Three men accused of being involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack – including the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – have agreed to plea deals at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prosecutors said on Wednesday.
“The Convening Authority for Military Commissions, Susan Escallier, has entered into pre-trial agreements with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi, three of the co-accused in the 9/11 case,” the Pentagon said in a short statement.
Defense lawyers have requested that the men receive life sentences in exchange for the guilty pleas, according to letters from the federal government received by relatives of some of the nearly 3,000 people killed on the morning of 11 September 2001.
“In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet,” said the letters, the New York Times reported.
Pentagon officials declined to immediately release the full terms of the plea bargains.
The agreement comes more than 16 years after their prosecution for the attack began, and more than 20 years after al-Qaida militants commandeered four commercial airliners to use as fuel-filled missiles, flying them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.
The hijackers steered the fourth plane toward Washington, but crew members and passengers tried to storm the cockpit, and the plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field.
The deal avoids both the prospect of a lengthy and complex trial, and the possibility that confessions seen as crucial to the case would be thrown out.
The men have been in US custody since 2003, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is widely seen as the chief plotter of the terror attacks. He allegedly received approval from the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who was killed by US forces in 2011, to craft what became the hijackings and killings.
Over the years, the case had become bogged down in lengthy pre-trial proceedings. The three men were initially charged jointly and arraigned on 5 June 2008, then were charged jointly and arraigned a second time on 5 May 2012, the Pentagon statement said.
Prosecutors said that Mohammed, who was an engineer and educated in the US, brought the idea of flying planes into buildings to bin Laden and then helped train and direct some of the hijackers who carried out the devastating attacks on US soil.
Mohammed and Hawsawi were captured together in Pakistan in March 2003. The pair were tortured by their US interrogators, including subjecting Mohammed to a record 183 rounds of waterboarding.
The use of torture has proven one of the most formidable obstacles in US efforts to try the men in the military commission at Guantánamo, because defense lawyers had argued that the men’s torture in secret CIA prisons had rendered the evidence against them unusable in legal proceedings.
Guantánamo Bay was set up in 2002 by then president George W Bush, in order to house foreign militants as part of the so-called war on terror. Its population grew to a peak of about 800 before it started to shrink. There are 30 people housed there today.
News of the plea deals drew a spectrum of reactions on Wednesday. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, condemned the deals in a statement, saying: “The only thing worse than negotiating with terrorists is negotiating with them after they are in custody.”
Daphne Eviatar, a director at the Amnesty International USA rights group, said she welcomed news of some accountability. She also urged the Biden administration to close Guantánamo. Many of its prisoners have been cleared, but are awaiting approval to leave for other countries.
Eviatar also condemned the use of torture, saying that “the Biden administration must also take all necessary measures to ensure that a program of state-sanctioned enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment will never be perpetrated by the United States again”.
Terry Strada, the national chair of a group of families of victims called 9/11 Families United, invoked the dozens of relatives who had died while awaiting justice for the killings when she heard news of the agreement.
“They were cowards when they planned the attack,” she said of the defendants. “And they’re cowards today.”
Strada was at Manhattan federal court for a hearing on one of many civil lawsuits when she heard news of the deals. She said many families have just wanted to see the men admit guilt.
“For me personally, I wanted to see a trial,” she said. “And they just took away the justice I was expecting – a trial and the punishment.”
Michael Burke, one of the family members who received the government notice of the plea bargain, condemned the long wait for justice and the outcome. Burke’s brother, Billy Burke, a New York City fire captain, had ordered his men out of the World Trade Center but remained on the 27th floor of the north tower of to assist others.
“It took months or a year at the Nuremberg trials,” said Burke. “To me, it’s always been disgraceful that these guys, 23 years later, have not been convicted and punished for their attacks, or the crime. I never understood how it took so long.”
“I think people would be shocked if you could go back in time and tell the people who just watched the towers go down: ‘Oh, hey, in 23 years, these guys who are responsible for this crime we just witnessed are going to be getting plea deals so they can avoid death and serve life in prison,’” he said.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting
